As much as I agree with you about the unfair treatment untaggeds receive, deerhunter appears to be the only one who made any attempt to kill you rather than farm you. Aside from that 1 nuke sent at you by another person.

Untaggeds don't have the right to any retals? Then untaggeds might as well just suicide on any alliance that hits them.

Not true. They accepted me midset a couple of times.

Were you untagged? If so, then you have no rights.

And if the countries were run by the same person who picked a fight with SoF with some of his other countries, don't expect for them to wait around for the rest of the untaggeds to join in the fun.

I'm awesome at getting attacked. And thats about it.

I like this 1:kill policy. I like it much more than 1:1 or land:land.

Is there anything wrong with a cross tag kill on an untagged country?

Its an alliance server, not an individual server. Unless you are Bobby, then you net with the protection of your alliance. If we don't call finishes tainted if someone gets to stockpile for a month on 25k acres with 3 million networth, why should they be called tainted if someone gets land from their alliance?

And if you're 3-4k acres this late in the set without being a late starter, then I would cry topfeeding.

If you have far less land than an all-explore country, you have no right to complain if people have to hit you more than once to get their land back.

What if I am 90% jets, and make the grab, and then buy a few million turrets so that I'm now have an equal number of jets and turrets. Was my grab legit?

Whats the formula for 'not enough defense'?
Is 1 million turrets enough for 10k acres? What about 2 million turrets for 10k acres?

The argument of 'not enough defense' comes down to whatever alliances are the best at warring get to decide what constitutes a reasonable amount of military, and then everyone else has to follow their rules or fight them.

Because buying jets and military strategy tech tends to boost my networth.

And its real easy for a non-jetter to match the defensive military of a turtle.

I want land:land, just because I don't want to have to run a retaller to protect my all-explore countries from being topfed.

I've run tyranny techers with max mil strat that exploited 1:1 retals, and realized it took no skill. All it takes is being offense heavy with similar networth and much less land than your target and max military strategy tech (and obviously, hitting a country that isn't in DR protection).

The equations governing land gains are not that complex, they're quite easy to figure out.

I don't want to have to keep low networth retallers with high military strategy tech just to make people pay for grabbing me. I could do that, but it wouldn't make me skilled. Playing high land high networth high production all-explore countries with 0 military strategy tech doesn't make me unskilled.

Landgrabbing does not take skill. It is very simple to learn the equations on how to maximize landgains and to practice that process.

My argument is still the same. Exchanging grabs benefits the less skilled player.

Having a decent amount of military meaning that only a hundred or so can break you would make for a rather ridiculous amount of military for all-explore countries to have to keep around. Either that, or this server runs an extremely tiny amount of military.

Tried that a few years ago, and it doesn't work. Techers & inactives & nubs will all topfeed your all-explore countries when you do that. If I had more than 15 countries in my tag, it might have worked better. I didn't have a problem breaking people, my problem was that I couldn't get my land back in one hit, even though I did no grabs on my own countries or other people's.

Military won't scare people away, lack of land is what scares people away.

In other words, you like it when every country is breakable and no one has any chance of bouncing retals or topfeeds.

If anything that reduces player to player interaction is a good thing, then why not allow every country to make 1 grab per day on every other alliance in the game without being retalled? This would increase the interaction between players. Everyone would get farmed, but everyone could make plenty of grabs back. As long as no one did any multi-taps, then there would be no need for retalling.

Having no defense on your countries is a valid strategy. Since nearly all countries are breakable, what difference should it make whether you run with 5 million turrets or 0? Regardless of how much defense you run, you will need to be willing to war to defend your alliance's retal policy. It is either your turrets or your alliance's retal policy that will keep people from grabbing you. If your turrets are not sufficient, then why even get turrets?

With retal policies, might makes right. If you can war to defend the policy, then it is your right to have that policy. That is why untaggeds have no rights.

When alliances lose the ability to retal or to be a threat in war, then they get farmed. Why? Because they have no might, thus they cannot enforce any retal policy.

Kill4Free - you seem to have forgotten about military costs, building costs, tech losses, etc. and all the other pitfalls that happen when exchanging grabs. Even if both sides gain a few hundred ghost acres, how many extra turns are spent rebuilding? If I lose 1000 acres and have 50 bpt, and gain 8 acres per turn exploring, then retal for 1160 acres (including ghost acres), then I've merely evened out the land loss, I have not gained anything. But I have possibly lost cash and food, and I have definitely lost tech, military, oil, and the money needing to be spent on 1000 buildings. If I happen to be grabbed by someone who has the same strategy as me, then this will partially ameliorate the tech & buildings losses. I also suffer from decreased production during those turns spent rebuilding back to where I had been before the attack.

You assume that people grabbing each other is good for the game. Yet you never back up that claim. I assert that people grabbing each other is harmful to the better country and benefits the weaker country. If it benefits both countries, then land:land retals are obviously not necessary. It is only when one country clearly suffers that land:land retals are enforced - which means that your argument against land:land retals should not use a situation in which 1:1 retals satisfy land:land to illustrate why land:land is bad.

Kill4Free - I guarantee that a good all-explorer will get hit by countries which are smaller in landsize than them. It's incredible how the proponents of how 1:1 retals help everyone involved are the ones who can benefit from topfeeding an all-explore country. Thus, their philosophy of 1:1 retals clearly has not benefitted them sufficiently.

Anything that reduces real player grabbing is a good thing. When two players exchange grabs, the less skilled player benefits more.

If your issue is with self farming, then why not just make a rule that there is no self farming allowed?

Last time I played FFA, people took advantage of 1:1 retals and topfed my all-explore countries. Having to do 1:1 retals and not getting all my land back when I was all-explore really pissed me off.

I don't see why real player grabbing is considered a good thing. It penalizes good players unless those good players are able to bounce retals.

Smaller clans are not inherently less skilled than bigger alliances. But what keeps someone from raping a less skilled alliance is the desire to avoid a war - since wars tend to ruin netting sets.

Detrimental to give players a fighting chance to be able to bounce retals? Everyone being able to break everyone doesn't help the climate.

That's why I'm willing to go to war for it, and looking for an alliance that would join me in going to war to defend land:land policies.

My philosophy is that if you don't like me taking my land back, get more turrets or don't grab me.

Its amazing how the proponents of 1:1 retals whine about netters running underdefended countries, but then fail to get adequate defense to stop land:land retals.

No, I'm saying either go all-explore or get enough defense to bounce retals.

Land:Land was put in place in response to alliances going to war if you got enough defense to bounce their retals. Because midfeeding alliances and bouncing retals causes wars, people stopped doing it (because it would turn a netting set into a war set). Without the need to bounce retals from established alliances, skilled players instead had to keep artificially low networths to have a larger selection of untaggeds & noobs to grab.

When two people trade grabs, the less skilled player benefits. 1:1 retals benefit the less skilled players. 1:1 is just as artificial a policy as land:land. The most realistic policy would be 1:kill.

If you grab someone who has not grabbed you, why should they not be allowed to take back what was theirs?

If you don't like someone doing land:land retals on you, get more turrets.

There are a few conditions. Most importantly, you have to have a land:land retal policy. I'm willing to fight for a land:land retal policy, but I have no interest in netting. The alliance also must believe in quality over quantity. Too many alliances, especially warmonger alliances, allow people to play in their alliance without expecting them to learn and follow the basics of Earth Empires.

If your offensive allies' army helps out on a planned strike, shouldn't their military that helped you be unavailable for 20 hours?

It'd be much simpler to just change it so that your offensive allies do not help out on a planned strike.

The offensive modifiers are too high these days, and its too easy to break people. Removing the ability for offensive allies to help out on a planned strike would be one step in rectifying this unbalance.

Land:Land crap isn't silly. Hitting an alliance that can retal you is silly.

If you idiots in FFA stopped grabbing people that can retal you, we wouldn't have to worry about 1:1 or Land:Land.

I may or may not be up for it, depends on whether I feel like stocking or warring with my monarchy techer (going demo or tyranny depending on the choice I make)

After thinking about it some more, and talking with my dad (who has a phd in math), we concluded that this really depended on how one defines a paradox. The definition my dad and I were most comfortable with is that a statement p is a paradox means "p iff p". Or in less mathematical terms, a statement is a paradox if the statement implies its negation and the negation implies the statement. Additionally, a statement being a paradox is not enough to indicate that a statement is either true or not true, or is false or not false.

Since this definition does not indicate that a paradox cannot also be true at the same time, or cannot also be false at the same time, then it is possible that a statement could meet one of those criteria.

The sentence "This sentence is neither true nor a paradox. " is therefore both false and a paradox.
Similarly, the sentence "This sentence is either false or is a paradox." is therefore both true and a paradox.

I'm a vampire, I was born in New Amsterdam in 1634 (the first of my family to be born in the new world), so I skew the average age a little bit.

Notorious is trying to write? That's an awesome news story!

I've been reading the book by Ernest Nagel and James Newman about Gödel's Proof, and my facebook status last weekend was "If I was an evil math teacher, I would put "This sentence is a lie." on a true-false test."

I "finished" the book today, but I will need to reread the 2nd to last chapter of the book a bunch of times to better understand it. I followed most of the book pretty easily, but the 2nd to last chapter of the book where they actually discuss his proof is something I could not comprehend my first time through.

But the book has had me thinking about the idea of consistency, which is why I tried tonight to come up with a statement that if it was a paradox implied it was not a paradox.

I did come up with it on my own, but it is so incredibly simple that I would be foolish to claim to be the first to have come up with it on their own.

That is the same conclusion I came to. It was not quite what I was expecting.

But you just said if it is a paradox, then it must be false.

Is it both false and a paradox at the same time?

If it is a paradox, then it must be false.

If it is false, then it must either be true or a paradox.

You did not include the necessary 3 dots after the finite string of 9s to generate controversy. Your statement is clearly false.

This sentence is neither true nor a paradox.

So what is it?

Now Kemo, there are people watching us, we need to be politically correct. They are not 'dumbass', they are intellectually challenged.

Something tender, blue, unspoken - Valentin Silvestrov
Spiegel im Spiegel - Arvo Part

I mostly listen to larger scale works (i.e. orthodox liturgies or 20th century symphonies) which wouldn't count as songs, but of the chamber music, those two are my favorites.

Everything is breakable. It just hurts your reputation a lot more to break a UNAP than to break a DNH.

1 member clans will always get bullied until they make people fear them.

I nominate Bobby to do FA for me. I like his style.

Given Jared's apparent political inclinations (judging from the books he listed as his favorites), I think the A word would actually be Anarchy.

Normally when you make accusations like this, you provide evidence to back up those claims.

I think that policing alliances should be allowed to make 1 grab a day on countries that are allied to countries that are involved in the war, after the war has been going on for 72+ hours. 72 hours is more than enough time to break off any pacts you have with a country that is an alliance that goes to war.

If he would have posted 14 hours earlier, he would have started it.

I find it ironic that the Democrats claim to be "pro-choice" and then take away a person's right to make their own decisions on health care.

Obamacare is anti-choice, anti-liberty. The Republican solution of 'regulated' health care is no better, because those in the government regulating the health care industry will be strongly influenced by the few major players in the health care industry.

Letting an industry regulate itself is one of the best ways to ensure that your economy is NOT laissez-faire. Allowing the healthcare business to become so centralized that only a few corporations control it is what leads to those corporations having coercive power over their consumers. When there are so few producers, consumers do not have a fair bargaining position with the producers.

Both Republicans and Democrats will work hard to ensure that the healthcare system is in the hands of a few corporations, and that those corporations hold the upper hand over consumers, and that those corporations can dictate exactly what the consumers must accept.

Corporations are an abomination to capitalism.

Awesome. I get to be on the government's terrorism watch list now, thanks to some of the country names I've used.

Ninja versus Samurai

How much defense is appropriate? 5 weeks into the set, anyone decent can drop their stockpile and get 30+ million jets. Does that mean that any country who doesn't want to be topfed needs to have 50 million+ turrets?

They need enough defense to stop untaggeds from breaking them, and that's it. Anyone else who grabs them, they can use land:land to get their land back. They do have an appropriate amount of defense. Especially given the wicked topfeeding curve which prevents an untagged from getting good land gains even if they can break a country twice their networth.

People are 'entitled' to their land, because the alternative is that other people are entitled to your land merely for being less adept at gaining and keeping land than you.

The only valid point in your post is that grabbing SoF isn't wise when SoF has slow growing slackers like you willing to grab people who are netting.

1:1 retals are for nubs. Good trolls do word:word retals for dumb posts.